Ubuntu 9.10 had its
beta release last week and the final release is coming in just three weeks,
but this late in the release cycle, it has been decided to pull in the final Mesa 7.6 version. Pulling
in this newer code that provides OpenGL acceleration on Linux provides numerous
bug-fixes along with support for a greater number of OpenGL extensions on different
hardware and other improvements.

We have been talking about Mesa 7.6 since this May when the OpenVG
state tracker was added in and since then it has picked up a plethora of new
features and changes. In this release on the ATI side it has integrated the Radeon
3D driver rewrite to use the buffer manager, VBO
and OQ support, and proper OpenGL 1.5 support. This time around the Intel
DRI and software drivers (along with the Gallium3D drivers) have picked up support
for various OpenGL extensions like GL_ARB_map_buffer_range, GL_ARB_copy_buffer,
and GL_ARB_vertex_array_object. Mesa 7.6 also includes the assembly
shader rework.

Mesa 7.6 does not drastically change the level of performance
compared to the older Mesa snapshot that was found in Ubuntu Karmic up until today,
but there are improvements in a few areas. In the below example from an Intel
G43 system we compared the Ubuntu 9.04, Ubuntu 9.10 Beta, and Ubuntu 9.10 Beta
with Mesa 7.6 performance using the Phoronix
Test Suite. With the Urban Terror game there were performance improvements
already to be found in Ubuntu 9.10 compared to Ubuntu 9.04 with Mesa 7.4, but
this latest code steps up the performance one bit more.

We have been testing out the latest Ubuntu 9.10 development builds
with the latest Mesa code and are quite pleased with the decision to pull this
latest Mesa code into the Karmic Koala, albeit at the very last minute. However,
this latest Mesa code in Ubuntu does not provide ATI R600/700 3D acceleration
support by default (nor is ATI kernel mode-setting enabled for Ubuntu 9.10), but
that will come with Ubuntu
10.04.

Canonical's Bryce Harrington made an announcement today on the
Ubuntu
development list today as well regarding Mesa 7.6 in Karmic with additional
details.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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